Her Final Year is a different kind of memoir. It’s not just a “looking back”
at the experience of being a care-provider for a loved one with dementia. Rather, it
is an unfolding of what happens during the care-giving experience, as it happens.

Every Alzheimer's patient, every family with someone who suffers from age-related dementia,
will have an individual path to walk. But certain things will likely happen along the
way. We decided to combine the experiences of two different families who went through
this. And to better understand the progression of care-giving over time, we shortened
four or five actual years into the more generic metaphor of a single year. Each month
of this metaphorical year represents a stage of the disease and the experience of caring for
someone with it.

Off to the left there are all the different months listed – click on any of those, and you
can see the introductory material from that chapter, which explains about that stage of
care-giving. In addition, the month of “May” (one of the shorter chapters) has the entire
contents of that chapter from the book, so you can see just how the entries – drawn from email,
blog posts and journal entries written at the time – create a sort of dialog.

We’ve approached writing this book this way in the hope that it will serve as something of
an ‘instant support group’ for anyone who is in the role of being a care-provider. You
can read what we were going through at the time, how we tried to cope with the problems and
stresses we encountered, how we experienced failures and successes. It is intended to be
something of a conversation with the reader.

Much of the material in the book is intensely personal, even embarrassing. We have
decided to share it ‘warts and all’ because that is the reality of being a long-term
care-provider for someone with dementia. You will make mistakes. You
will sometimes feel crushed by the isolation and stress. You will get into
arguments with family and friends, and even say or do things that you later regret. You
will occasionally resent, or even hate, the person for whom you are caring. We
did. It’s completely normal, but seeing how others experience these things can be very
helpful.

Lastly, you’ll note that there are four different voices through the bulk of the book, but
only two in the final section, which is titled “His First Year.” That’s because Jim and
John were the primary care-providers for their respective mothers-in-law. It would have
been impossible for either of them to have done the care-giving on their own. But there
is also a dearth of material about what it is to be a man in the role of care-provider, and we
thought that adding this perspective would be helpful to the many men who will, or have, found
themselves in this role.